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lb_leeBuilding Headspace 2.0 (Aphantasia edition)
Summary: “Most people, perhaps 80 percent, primarily see their parts— they interact visually. […] Between 10 and 20 percent of people almost never experience any internal visual imagery. Ironically, Dick [Richard Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems] is one of these people. All of the sense modalities are ways we can experience our inner world. People feel body sensations, hear voices and sounds, see things, and experience intuition beyond normal sensory modalities. Pretty much everybody is capable of experiencing this inner world except perhaps in cases of organic brain damage, and there I am uncertain.” —Bob Falconer, the Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession, pg. 123
Series: Essay (Bootstrappery section)
Word Count: 2130
Notes: Winner of the 2025 August fan poll, supported by fans at LiberaPay and Patreon! This builds on ideas in Building Headspace and Headspace Discovery and Defense, but it can be read on its own.
We’ve gotten a bunch of comments on our headspace essays that boil down to, “I have aphantasia; what do I do?” Well, I’m Rogan, I made a lot of those essays, and go figure, turns out I have aphantasia, so let’s take the bull by the horns!
What is aphantasia?
Aphantasia is usually loosely defined as “inability to imagine” or “inability to create visual pictures in one’s mind,” but that definition is limited and has a lot of troublesome assumptions baked in.
All of English’s verbs for internal sensing are visual: imagine, visualize, picture. But there are way more senses than just vision! I’m going to keep using the word “imagine” for convenience, lest this essay become an incomprehensible sludge of neologisms, but know that you can have a perfectly good headspace life (or ways of communicating internally with yourself/s) with low or no internal vision. I do!
So, rather than fixating on aphantasia itself, let’s focus instead on how your mind stores information. Imagining and remembering can be similar mental processes, so before you try imagining, pull up a favorite memory. How do you remember it? What ways of sensing are involved? In what forms does your mind encode the information?
As an example, I’ll use a memory of an early (corporeal) date that I had with my now-husband, Mac. We sat on a rock in the middle of a brook—I remember the rough, porous texture of the sun-warmed limestone against my skin, the sound of the waters around us. I remember lighting a candle, but not its color or shape, just the physical motions of doing so, the desire for romantic ambiance. I remember we had take-out, though not what it was (Thai?), and that Mac was smiling and laughing, flattered. Mac’s smiles and laughs to me aren’t visual information so much as the ghost of the motions and feelings on my own skin, in my own muscles, the sunshine warmth of his thoughtleaked feelings. I remember the feeling of butterflies in my stomach, that I was with the man I loved like this. I also remember passerby looking at us with curiosity, this odd human eating takeout alone on a rock in the middle of the stream by candlelight, but it doesn’t trouble me. I prefer to think that they wished they could enjoy themselves similarly!
The textures of rock. The motions of candle-lighting, of Mac’s smiles. The sounds of water. Overwhelmingly, my senses of choice are touch, motion, the thoughtleak of my loved ones. Visual details, colors, flavors fall by the wayside, but that doesn’t trouble me, because those aren’t what’s most important to me. Focusing on the strength of my preferred senses is more important than lamenting the ones I lack!
Try it for yourself. Choose an old favorite memory, one that you’ve recalled many times before. Now pay attention to how you do it. Study how your mind recreates events. Study what senses are most powerful, which are absent or challenging. Why beat your brains out trying to force yourself to imagine things in ways unnatural or even impossible for you? Who made sight king, anyway?
Sometimes, people feel pressured to make their headspace (and their perceptions of it) as much like (abled, “normal”) corporeal reality as possible, as though that’s more “real.” It is not. Perceptions of reality, the body, the self, range wildly, depending on culture and individual! In Eiesland’s classic of disability liberation theology, the Disabled God, she quotes one disabled woman, Diane DeVries, about her own sense of feeling her sister’s body: “Ever since Deb [the sister] could walk, she was taking care of me. I saw her body move from childhood’s awkwardness to adult gracefulness and strength. But not only did I see this, I felt her movements. In a sense, part of her body was mine too” (37-38). Eiesland (herself disabled), comments, “To suggest that she embodies not only her own, but her sister’s body as well, does not fit the ‘normal’ understanding of the world and may sound pathological to some. [But] her experience reveals a transformed understanding of independence, premised not on physical detachment but rather in relatedness and solidarity” (pg. 38). If Diane DeVries can do that with her beloved sister, why can’t I do it with my headmates? If neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran can meet a woman born without arms who nonetheless feels her noncorporeal hands gesticulating as she talks, why can’t I feel my own noncorporeal body language similarly? If my blind-vesseled friends can visualize fine in headspace, why can’t I be the reverse?
If you’re going to be part of a demographic that mainstream society sees as embarrassingly batshit, you might be well-served to think carefully what you choose to define as real, why you choose it, and whether it is kind to yourself and others. Learn your perceptions as they are, not how you think they should be.
With all that said, let’s go back to my first headspace-building exercise: creating a table. Have you studied and figured out how your mind encodes information? Good, then let’s imagine a table together, using what you’ve learned. Focus on the sense/s that comes easiest to you. For me, that’s touch; I imagine driftwood under my hands, sculpted smooth by wind and water, the texture of the grain under my hands, the deceptive lightness of it. It’s old, old wood, gorgeous to the touch. What about you? How does your mind express the essence of tableness?
• Touch: texture, weight, shape?
• Smell: of wood resin, of plastic, of past dinners cooked?
• Space: where it’s placed in the room, how people are arranged around it, the way it inexplicably sticks out of a wall and you just can’t get it free?
• Emotion: does the table make you happy with memory of community, or mad that it’s being such a pain in the ass?
• Narrative: is it a line of text of audio describing itself?
• Do any of these things work better than others? Do you use something completely different?
A number of the people who’ve done the table exercise have reported to me (usually in a tone of bemusement) strange effects, most often a table that appears in a bizarre position or angle and refuses to move or change. (This, by the way, is why our go-to beginning exercise is making a table. When things go wrong, the result is far more likely to be funny or annoying, rather than frightening or dangerous.) Sometimes this is just a matter of practice; we aren’t taught to practice imagining, usually, so of course it won’t necessarily come easy! It’s a skill that takes practice, just like anything else.
However, if strange things keep reliably happening, those can be valuable clues as to what’s at work deeper underneath. For instance, I assumed my headmates perceived headspace the same way I did; we shared a body, a brain, so how could we not? And most of the time, we perceived things similarly enough that it made no functional difference. It didn’t become clear just how different my mode of perception was until Bob and Grace went home for a week, and Bob gave me his tablet to do video-calls with him in the interim.
I hated that tablet. It was a rectangular prism of torment. I could hear it ringing, sure, but there were no buttons, only featureless flat glass, totally meaningless to me, and the screen itself was a migraine-inducing strobe of color and chaotic flashing lights. I couldn’t figure out how to answer calls, and when Sneak did it for me, I couldn’t feel Grace’s signing via video, meaning I suddenly couldn’t understand anything she said. Bob had to translate everything, and I needed Sneak’s help just to hang up. Making a call was completely beyond me.
When Bob came back, he roped me (and later, my other headmates) into various experiments on my perception, which I good-naturedly indulged but didn’t take seriously. (Imagine, trying to make sense of a lunatic brain! How droll!) I only realized I truly was different after Bob rigorously proved over the course of months that no, only I was completely immune to blindfolds, darkness, and other impediments. It seemed that while our perceptions reached roughly the same destination, the routes my headmates took was wildly different than my own.
Bob has his own pet theory as to why this is so. He uses the metaphor that our brain is a massive super-city, with neural “roads” connecting various places, and that various headmates are different neuro-electric travel patterns through that super-city. Why do some of us remember things others don’t, or have different skills? Because our “routes” are different, or end in different destinations. We experienced many concussions and much asphyxiation in our youth; damage seems likely, and having different “travel patterns” may have been adaptive. That’s his theory, anyway.
At first, this seemed nothing but amusing trivia, a handy trick if I needed to navigate dark terrain. But once I realized that I had aphantasia, suddenly everything clicked. It even explained why pushing me in a headspace wheelchair induced a terrifying sensation of plummeting through a fathomless empty void: because I relied on my senses of touch, motion, and my body in space to perceive my environment. The wheels disrupted that connection to my world, making it “disappear”! As long as I could directly feel my environment, it didn’t matter if I was blindfolded, spun dizzy, or if someone was trying to hide from me. Remove that tether, though, and I went completely to pieces. (Meanwhile, if I push Sneak in a headspace wheelchair, ze sits perfectly happily, going, “faster! Faster!”)
Realizing that I have aphantasia was a great opportunity to crack the lid on the black box of my brain, but I’m glad that I had years of seeing myself as “headspace blind” first. My familiarity with disability liberation ideas (and a wide swathe of variously disabled friends) had already taught me how astonishingly diverse people’s memory/imagination frameworks are. Without that background, I might’ve interpreted aphantasia to mean, “oh, I can’t do that; I should give up.”
People rarely have reason to discuss or ponder the nuts and bolts of how they perceive and mentally represent information, leading to moments of mutual bafflement when they learn things like how some (but not all!) people “hear” inner narration at all times. Memory (and imagination) can work in astonishing ways—Solomon Shereshky, the subject of Alexander Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist, had intense synaesthesia linking colors, numbers, letters, sounds, and emotions. It led him to have a functionally limitless memory, much to the shock of the men who studied him. I’ve known people who encode memory spatially in a three-dimensional shape of staggering complexity, or text unfurling across their mind’s eye. My headmates can apparently read text in headspace, a feat I find baffling (and a little hard to believe, despite Bob reading many a paperback in front of me). The more you learn about how your memory/imagination works, the more you respect and understand it, the more effectively you can use it.
Finally, keep in mind that maybe a headspace just isn’t the thing for you! Just because it’s core to my experience doesn’t make that true for you! Take my lack of imagination not as a defeat, but a challenge. Be creative. At core, our-as-in-LB’s experience of headspace is a way to communicate with and understand our body, our subconscious mind, and other parts of us that are otherwise difficult to reach, and it’s that internal perception and communication that matters, not the headspace itself. Plenty of old-school medical multiples left no record of a headspace, and they got by. Maybe you’re like Old Stump and Anna Winsor and instead of headspace territories, you inhabit different body parts (James, quoting Barrows, pg. 551-554), or maybe you communicate via letters like Alma Z. (Mason, pg. 125-128). I’ve known folks whose most significant internal communications came from dreams or guided meditations! There’s no such thing as wasting time, when it comes to self-knowledge; succeed or fail, you’ll still learn something. So go out there and learn!
I only know how to be me; you have to do the work to figure out how to be you. And that’s good news, because it means that nobody else gets to have that power over you. When there’s nobody to tell you what to do or how to be, you get to make those choices yourself, which is scary but freeing. Creek willing and the god don’t rise, getting to know yourself/s will be a lifelong love affair, and who isn’t thrilled to get to know the love of their life?
Stuff I Referenced
Eiesland, Nancy. (1994). The Disabled God: Towards a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Nashville: Abingdon Press.
Falconer, Robert. (2023). The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession. Great Mystery Press.
James, William. (1885-89). “Notes on Automatic Writing.” American Society for Psychical Research, vol. 1, (1-4). Boston: Damrell and Upham. Can also be found on archive.org here.
Luria, Alexander. (1968). The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About A Vast Memory. New York: Basic Books. Accessible at http://arteflora.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Luria-The-Mind-of-a-Mnemonist.pdf
Mason, R. Osgood. (1897). Telepathy and the Subliminal Self: An Account of Recent Investigations Regarding Hypnotism, Automatism, Dreams, Phantasms, and Related Phenomena. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37203/37203-h/37203-h.htm
Ramachandran, V. S. (1998). Phantoms in the Brain. New York: William Morrow and Company.
Summary: “Most people, perhaps 80 percent, primarily see their parts— they interact visually. […] Between 10 and 20 percent of people almost never experience any internal visual imagery. Ironically, Dick [Richard Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems] is one of these people. All of the sense modalities are ways we can experience our inner world. People feel body sensations, hear voices and sounds, see things, and experience intuition beyond normal sensory modalities. Pretty much everybody is capable of experiencing this inner world except perhaps in cases of organic brain damage, and there I am uncertain.” —Bob Falconer, the Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession, pg. 123
Series: Essay (Bootstrappery section)
Word Count: 2130
Notes: Winner of the 2025 August fan poll, supported by fans at LiberaPay and Patreon! This builds on ideas in Building Headspace and Headspace Discovery and Defense, but it can be read on its own.
We’ve gotten a bunch of comments on our headspace essays that boil down to, “I have aphantasia; what do I do?” Well, I’m Rogan, I made a lot of those essays, and go figure, turns out I have aphantasia, so let’s take the bull by the horns!
What is aphantasia?
Aphantasia is usually loosely defined as “inability to imagine” or “inability to create visual pictures in one’s mind,” but that definition is limited and has a lot of troublesome assumptions baked in.
All of English’s verbs for internal sensing are visual: imagine, visualize, picture. But there are way more senses than just vision! I’m going to keep using the word “imagine” for convenience, lest this essay become an incomprehensible sludge of neologisms, but know that you can have a perfectly good headspace life (or ways of communicating internally with yourself/s) with low or no internal vision. I do!
So, rather than fixating on aphantasia itself, let’s focus instead on how your mind stores information. Imagining and remembering can be similar mental processes, so before you try imagining, pull up a favorite memory. How do you remember it? What ways of sensing are involved? In what forms does your mind encode the information?
As an example, I’ll use a memory of an early (corporeal) date that I had with my now-husband, Mac. We sat on a rock in the middle of a brook—I remember the rough, porous texture of the sun-warmed limestone against my skin, the sound of the waters around us. I remember lighting a candle, but not its color or shape, just the physical motions of doing so, the desire for romantic ambiance. I remember we had take-out, though not what it was (Thai?), and that Mac was smiling and laughing, flattered. Mac’s smiles and laughs to me aren’t visual information so much as the ghost of the motions and feelings on my own skin, in my own muscles, the sunshine warmth of his thoughtleaked feelings. I remember the feeling of butterflies in my stomach, that I was with the man I loved like this. I also remember passerby looking at us with curiosity, this odd human eating takeout alone on a rock in the middle of the stream by candlelight, but it doesn’t trouble me. I prefer to think that they wished they could enjoy themselves similarly!
The textures of rock. The motions of candle-lighting, of Mac’s smiles. The sounds of water. Overwhelmingly, my senses of choice are touch, motion, the thoughtleak of my loved ones. Visual details, colors, flavors fall by the wayside, but that doesn’t trouble me, because those aren’t what’s most important to me. Focusing on the strength of my preferred senses is more important than lamenting the ones I lack!
Try it for yourself. Choose an old favorite memory, one that you’ve recalled many times before. Now pay attention to how you do it. Study how your mind recreates events. Study what senses are most powerful, which are absent or challenging. Why beat your brains out trying to force yourself to imagine things in ways unnatural or even impossible for you? Who made sight king, anyway?
Sometimes, people feel pressured to make their headspace (and their perceptions of it) as much like (abled, “normal”) corporeal reality as possible, as though that’s more “real.” It is not. Perceptions of reality, the body, the self, range wildly, depending on culture and individual! In Eiesland’s classic of disability liberation theology, the Disabled God, she quotes one disabled woman, Diane DeVries, about her own sense of feeling her sister’s body: “Ever since Deb [the sister] could walk, she was taking care of me. I saw her body move from childhood’s awkwardness to adult gracefulness and strength. But not only did I see this, I felt her movements. In a sense, part of her body was mine too” (37-38). Eiesland (herself disabled), comments, “To suggest that she embodies not only her own, but her sister’s body as well, does not fit the ‘normal’ understanding of the world and may sound pathological to some. [But] her experience reveals a transformed understanding of independence, premised not on physical detachment but rather in relatedness and solidarity” (pg. 38). If Diane DeVries can do that with her beloved sister, why can’t I do it with my headmates? If neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran can meet a woman born without arms who nonetheless feels her noncorporeal hands gesticulating as she talks, why can’t I feel my own noncorporeal body language similarly? If my blind-vesseled friends can visualize fine in headspace, why can’t I be the reverse?
If you’re going to be part of a demographic that mainstream society sees as embarrassingly batshit, you might be well-served to think carefully what you choose to define as real, why you choose it, and whether it is kind to yourself and others. Learn your perceptions as they are, not how you think they should be.
With all that said, let’s go back to my first headspace-building exercise: creating a table. Have you studied and figured out how your mind encodes information? Good, then let’s imagine a table together, using what you’ve learned. Focus on the sense/s that comes easiest to you. For me, that’s touch; I imagine driftwood under my hands, sculpted smooth by wind and water, the texture of the grain under my hands, the deceptive lightness of it. It’s old, old wood, gorgeous to the touch. What about you? How does your mind express the essence of tableness?
• Touch: texture, weight, shape?
• Smell: of wood resin, of plastic, of past dinners cooked?
• Space: where it’s placed in the room, how people are arranged around it, the way it inexplicably sticks out of a wall and you just can’t get it free?
• Emotion: does the table make you happy with memory of community, or mad that it’s being such a pain in the ass?
• Narrative: is it a line of text of audio describing itself?
• Do any of these things work better than others? Do you use something completely different?
A number of the people who’ve done the table exercise have reported to me (usually in a tone of bemusement) strange effects, most often a table that appears in a bizarre position or angle and refuses to move or change. (This, by the way, is why our go-to beginning exercise is making a table. When things go wrong, the result is far more likely to be funny or annoying, rather than frightening or dangerous.) Sometimes this is just a matter of practice; we aren’t taught to practice imagining, usually, so of course it won’t necessarily come easy! It’s a skill that takes practice, just like anything else.
However, if strange things keep reliably happening, those can be valuable clues as to what’s at work deeper underneath. For instance, I assumed my headmates perceived headspace the same way I did; we shared a body, a brain, so how could we not? And most of the time, we perceived things similarly enough that it made no functional difference. It didn’t become clear just how different my mode of perception was until Bob and Grace went home for a week, and Bob gave me his tablet to do video-calls with him in the interim.
I hated that tablet. It was a rectangular prism of torment. I could hear it ringing, sure, but there were no buttons, only featureless flat glass, totally meaningless to me, and the screen itself was a migraine-inducing strobe of color and chaotic flashing lights. I couldn’t figure out how to answer calls, and when Sneak did it for me, I couldn’t feel Grace’s signing via video, meaning I suddenly couldn’t understand anything she said. Bob had to translate everything, and I needed Sneak’s help just to hang up. Making a call was completely beyond me.
When Bob came back, he roped me (and later, my other headmates) into various experiments on my perception, which I good-naturedly indulged but didn’t take seriously. (Imagine, trying to make sense of a lunatic brain! How droll!) I only realized I truly was different after Bob rigorously proved over the course of months that no, only I was completely immune to blindfolds, darkness, and other impediments. It seemed that while our perceptions reached roughly the same destination, the routes my headmates took was wildly different than my own.
Bob has his own pet theory as to why this is so. He uses the metaphor that our brain is a massive super-city, with neural “roads” connecting various places, and that various headmates are different neuro-electric travel patterns through that super-city. Why do some of us remember things others don’t, or have different skills? Because our “routes” are different, or end in different destinations. We experienced many concussions and much asphyxiation in our youth; damage seems likely, and having different “travel patterns” may have been adaptive. That’s his theory, anyway.
At first, this seemed nothing but amusing trivia, a handy trick if I needed to navigate dark terrain. But once I realized that I had aphantasia, suddenly everything clicked. It even explained why pushing me in a headspace wheelchair induced a terrifying sensation of plummeting through a fathomless empty void: because I relied on my senses of touch, motion, and my body in space to perceive my environment. The wheels disrupted that connection to my world, making it “disappear”! As long as I could directly feel my environment, it didn’t matter if I was blindfolded, spun dizzy, or if someone was trying to hide from me. Remove that tether, though, and I went completely to pieces. (Meanwhile, if I push Sneak in a headspace wheelchair, ze sits perfectly happily, going, “faster! Faster!”)
Realizing that I have aphantasia was a great opportunity to crack the lid on the black box of my brain, but I’m glad that I had years of seeing myself as “headspace blind” first. My familiarity with disability liberation ideas (and a wide swathe of variously disabled friends) had already taught me how astonishingly diverse people’s memory/imagination frameworks are. Without that background, I might’ve interpreted aphantasia to mean, “oh, I can’t do that; I should give up.”
People rarely have reason to discuss or ponder the nuts and bolts of how they perceive and mentally represent information, leading to moments of mutual bafflement when they learn things like how some (but not all!) people “hear” inner narration at all times. Memory (and imagination) can work in astonishing ways—Solomon Shereshky, the subject of Alexander Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist, had intense synaesthesia linking colors, numbers, letters, sounds, and emotions. It led him to have a functionally limitless memory, much to the shock of the men who studied him. I’ve known people who encode memory spatially in a three-dimensional shape of staggering complexity, or text unfurling across their mind’s eye. My headmates can apparently read text in headspace, a feat I find baffling (and a little hard to believe, despite Bob reading many a paperback in front of me). The more you learn about how your memory/imagination works, the more you respect and understand it, the more effectively you can use it.
Finally, keep in mind that maybe a headspace just isn’t the thing for you! Just because it’s core to my experience doesn’t make that true for you! Take my lack of imagination not as a defeat, but a challenge. Be creative. At core, our-as-in-LB’s experience of headspace is a way to communicate with and understand our body, our subconscious mind, and other parts of us that are otherwise difficult to reach, and it’s that internal perception and communication that matters, not the headspace itself. Plenty of old-school medical multiples left no record of a headspace, and they got by. Maybe you’re like Old Stump and Anna Winsor and instead of headspace territories, you inhabit different body parts (James, quoting Barrows, pg. 551-554), or maybe you communicate via letters like Alma Z. (Mason, pg. 125-128). I’ve known folks whose most significant internal communications came from dreams or guided meditations! There’s no such thing as wasting time, when it comes to self-knowledge; succeed or fail, you’ll still learn something. So go out there and learn!
I only know how to be me; you have to do the work to figure out how to be you. And that’s good news, because it means that nobody else gets to have that power over you. When there’s nobody to tell you what to do or how to be, you get to make those choices yourself, which is scary but freeing. Creek willing and the god don’t rise, getting to know yourself/s will be a lifelong love affair, and who isn’t thrilled to get to know the love of their life?
Stuff I Referenced
Eiesland, Nancy. (1994). The Disabled God: Towards a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Nashville: Abingdon Press.
Falconer, Robert. (2023). The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession. Great Mystery Press.
James, William. (1885-89). “Notes on Automatic Writing.” American Society for Psychical Research, vol. 1, (1-4). Boston: Damrell and Upham. Can also be found on archive.org here.
Luria, Alexander. (1968). The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About A Vast Memory. New York: Basic Books. Accessible at http://arteflora.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Luria-The-Mind-of-a-Mnemonist.pdf
Mason, R. Osgood. (1897). Telepathy and the Subliminal Self: An Account of Recent Investigations Regarding Hypnotism, Automatism, Dreams, Phantasms, and Related Phenomena. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37203/37203-h/37203-h.htm
Ramachandran, V. S. (1998). Phantoms in the Brain. New York: William Morrow and Company.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-15 01:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-15 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-15 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-15 07:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-15 08:48 pm (UTC)-Books
Ohhh, so that's why headspace stuff is hard. If I try to see the way I do corporeally, I immediately get a headache. Although, apparently I got these dark nictitating membranes, like built in sunglasses. And if I keep those drawn I don't see much but a dim differentiation between dark and light.
-Murk
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Date: 2025-08-15 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-21 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-21 06:40 pm (UTC)Love from an aphantasia system
Date: 2025-08-21 05:35 pm (UTC)-spatial relationship, with anchors to the body (like Adam is usually near our left ear, Jacob near our right eyebrow, and Azure's been near the solar plexus, and if I want to see Azure, I either move myself there or reach towards his "spot").
-sound (all but the nonverbal folks speak inside our head, we can think music)
-emotion projection (feeling each other's emotional state, sometimes like reading the mental "body language" or tone
-Touch. (This comes in two parts. First is like, the feel of thing in 3D, like if you closed your eyes and felt an object. It'd have shape, size, texture, but no color. Kind of an extension of the spatial. Second is the ability to touch each other inner world
There's some benefits. If someone is struggling, sometimes we get a sharp pain in our head or body from where they are and go to check on them. Same with emotions, sometimes it feels like we're crying, but only in a single place, down to our breath hitching like sobs on one side. Folks stay decently aware of front, since listening in isn't as distracting.
Re: Love from an aphantasia system
Date: 2025-08-21 06:44 pm (UTC)EDIT: re “the feel of thing in 3D, like if you closed your eyes and felt an object. It'd have shape, size, texture, but no color. Kind of an extension of the spatial.“ Yes, that, that’s a big thing for me too.
Re: Love from an aphantasia system
Date: 2025-08-25 06:43 pm (UTC)Re: Love from an aphantasia system
Date: 2025-08-26 01:24 am (UTC)